What are we telling pull-downs? We're saying, look, you're awesome, but I'm gonna date other people too. And by date, I mean train, and by other people, I mean with different exercises. And look, if you have a problem with that, I mean...
Hey folks, Dr. Mike here for RP Strength, and today's topic is a little harsh. I've been watching with my wife and Scott the video guy and his significant other have been watching this as well, some shows on Netflix where it's like making the band and people need to be told real like just stuff that's difficult to hear when you have hopes and aspirations like you don't have a ton of talent for this level. This is one of these videos where the talent seeker, the future K-pop artist is Lat Pulldowns. And Lat Pulldowns come in and they're like, oh, Buzzo, I'm just really excited to be here, and I just kind of want to do my best. What do you guys think?
And I'm the head judge, and I have to be like, you were so good, but you weren't great. The tears start flowing. We've always had these dreams since I was 12. All right, well, cry somewhere else. I'm big time Hollywood, and I have time for this.
Security, get this person out and put them in the street, ideally in a dumpster. We're not gonna do that with lat pulldowns, but we are gonna talk about how lat pulldowns are a good exercise, but they have some flaws. And- I love lat pulldowns, but it's good to talk about the flaws and see how it's possible maybe with some other exercises that we can recommend to you guys to remediate those flaws and at least broaden our perspective on variation to say, hey, lat pulldowns are a very good option, but there are other options that are also quite good.
And maybe there's no one the best back exercise, but by seeing both upsides and downsides of a movement, we can start to understand a little bit more about the problem space and dot, dot, dot, get you more jacked. Let's do it. So. Again, first part here, pull-downs are super good.
They're great for the lats and most of the back, in fact. They're great exercise for the rear delts. You can get a ton of rear delt hypertrophy just doing pull-downs. They're also awesome for the brachialis complex and even a bit for the biceps because pulling involves your elbow flexion as well as movement of the shoulder.
So we can't forget that. A very good exercise indeed. But... Lat pulldowns have some kind of well-understood downsides that I want to share with you just to get the noodle going, just to get you thinking a bit. And ideally, that makes you uncomfortable because you're not used to thinking at all for yourself.
I don't know where that went. That was rude. First downside is at the very top of the lat pulldown, the amount of tension generated by or imposed into the lats and all the other muscles of the back is functionally pretty close to zero.
Because but for the tension of you just hanging there, which passes through a lot of tendinous and ligamentous structures, a bunch of other muscles, as well as the lats and the muscles of the back, so it's not just a back isolating thing, other than the dead hang forces, at the very top, there's no misalignment between the bone of your upper arm and the joint. So there's no fulcrum. There's no leverage point.
And thus... As you get close to the very top of the movement, the amount of tension asked of and transmitted through the muscles of the back in the pulldown declines up until it gets close to zero at the very lockout dead hang part. That's not ideal because a lot of the mechanisms for hypertrophy go through that pathway of tension delivered at long muscle lengths. But if we know in the lat pulldown that the most tension is delivered at the shortest muscle lengths, and the least is delivered at the longest, well, that's just not that great. It's not terrible, but it's not that great.
opposite of that, the corollary of that is even a little bit worse in a certain sense. Here's why. So in any one given rep, that's your last rep that you can do with good technique.
Almost always, you're going to miss it close to the chest. So the lat pull down comes all the way down, goes past the chin and touches your upper chest and kind of an ideal or typically prescribed technique, which is a good technique. But this lower third from your face roughly down to your chest.
is going to be the toughest part of the movement where the leverage is difficult. And that's also if you do some pushing movements like a high-inclined barbell bench press. It's like the opposite of lat pulldowns in almost every respect.
And you notice at the very bottom, it's a ton of tension on your delts, on your upper chest, on your triceps. That's good. But if you flip that over and the tension comes from the other perspective, it's... pulling rather than pushing, then we still have a ton of tension to get into that position.
But unfortunately, while muscles are in that position, if they're the chest and the shoulders and the triceps, they're being maximally stretched. Amazing. That same high tension position and pull downs, high tension for the same mechanical reasons, these muscles are actually closer to their peak contraction point, to their most flexed muscle point.
And that means that that peak contraction, when you stop here, because you can't... pull any further, you can't get it below your eyes, no more good technique, that's the end, that's zero reps in reserve or failure. When you rack it, you have to ask yourself the question of what part of the movement was the part that really stopped that? And the answer was it was that bottom part.
And so when you reach failure with lat pulldowns, you can ask another question of like, well, if I kept going, but just halfway up and down at the stretched half, could I have done more reps? And the answer is yes, definitely quite a few more reps. So precisely in that top half area. where much of the growth comes from anyway, you don't even get a chance to do that for as many reps in a given set because of the fact that your strength is limited by that bottom half, bottom third component, not ideal. And every single next problem, every single rep that you do on your way to a set of 15 and lat pulldowns, for example, is composed of that top end and then that bottom end.
The bottom end promotes growth the least. but takes the most energy away from you. The top end promotes growth the most, though as we saw mechanically, not ideally in the lats, but definitely gonna do something. However, it's limited by the number of bottom ends you do because the bottom ends, they don't do as much growth stimulus, but they sap a crap load of energy. So by the time you've done 15 reps, you have 15 bottom halves that took a crap load of your energy.
And if the exercise was arranged in another way, where it was really hard at the top, but real easy at the bottom. Once you got through that hard top part, you could coast to the bottom. The bottom part isn't really drawing a lot of your energy.
As a matter of fact, it could be so easy, like in something like prime rows, where you actually rest a little bit at the bottom, and you get a chance to do even more reps that set at that deep stretch. With lat pulldowns, that bottom part doesn't give you a ton of growth or as much, and it just fatigues you so much that it ends up being that . In any given set, you spend a lot of time in that not lengthened position, not stimulating in a ton of gains, but paying huge fatigue price.
And your top half could have been good for 20 or 25 reps, but you're not going to get that far because the bottom half is going to sap you of the energy to do it. Even if you went and said, okay, once I did a full range of motion pull down for as many reps as I can, even if you start doing top end partials, you're already so cooked in large respect from. all of those bottom end really difficult portions of the lat pulldown. And it's like, okay, all this energy I'm spending on this bottom end, it better be doing me a lot of muscle growth.
And it's not, not as much as that length of position. So this is definitely, definitely not ideal. For these reasons, lat pulldowns are good, but they're not great.
There are a couple of exercises that can offer us a few advantages to maybe fill in the blanks that lat pulldowns can't. And I'd like to talk to you about these exercises and suggest. that you just give them a shot.
We're not pushing lat pulldowns out of the way. We're just saying, hey, you know, like you're not going to be a solo artist. Here's this other person. They're from Korea and they're better at everything than you.
They're in charge now. Oh, sorry. Too much K-pop watching. Exercises to try if your lat pulldowns are feeling stale.
What does stale mean? It means your joints are starting to be like, bro. It means you're not excited about the exercise. It means it takes you more sets to get. pumped and more sets to get sore than usual.
And your strength on the exercise is kind of peaked and isn't going up anymore. You're just kind of like, oh, I need a break. You know, like every relationship after. several weeks, depending on who you are, several decades. A potential exercise to replace lat pulldowns within your program for some time is called the lat prayer, otherwise known as the straight arm lat pulldown.
This is the one where you back up away from the cable stack, you lean over almost or very close to 90 degrees, parallel to the ground, and then you essentially do the movement there, or it looks like praying, where you go all the way to a big stretch and bring your hands up. all the way down. These done properly are never limited by your peak contraction because the part where you're touching your thighs is the easiest part of the movement. And the part at which your lat is maximally stretched now has two advantages.
Not only is it now the hardest part of the movement, which is awesome, hard part of the movement is the longest muscle lengths, we're already winning. But also the amount of tension that is imposed on the lats at that position is really, really gnarly. I mean, if you lean over and push your chest down to where your whole torso is roughly perpendicular to the cable stack, you're actually putting in maximum theoretical forces directly to the lats and the muscles of your back that pull your arm down at the most stretched possible position. I mean, it's tough to make up an exercise biomechanically alone that's better than that. You can alter the lat pulldown straight arm, aka the lat prayer, in a way that makes it less than ideal.
Some people, what they do is as they bring the bar down, they're going to kind of have sex with the bar. On the way up, they hip into it. That does let them feel a pretty good peak contraction for the back at the bottom, get the lats crunched. That might have some value, though probably not a ton.
Most people should only be coming up as much as let the cable not hit your face. Yes, almost everyone will have to hip in because if you just keep pulling, the cable is going to hit you right in the face or on the head and that doesn't feel great. So what I would do is come up and bring your head up and chest up and torso up only as much at that bottom position, sorry, at the top position as allows you to just gently touch your thighs.
And then as soon as you've touched your thighs with the implement, you slowly go back up with your arms and lower your chest and lower your entire torso to put that nasty stretch on your lats. So. Unless you mess with the bar and go way too much of an upright torso position at the peak contraction, this exercise is excellent, excellent, excellent.
And you don't lose any energy at the peak. It's all around really, really good stuff. Another great thing about this exercise is that the number of grips you have is only limited by your creativity and the kinds of grips you have at your gym.
You can do parallel grip. You can do the rope grip. You can do close grip. You can do wide. Each one of these ends up being its own little mini exercise, so you can use lat prayers consistently almost year-round in your program, occasionally switching grips, seeing which one feels different, seeing which one feels better, and keep on going.
A very related movement that's, again, biomechanically probably in a strict sense better for the lats is the pullover, which is really the same thing as the lat prayer except with free weight. You lie down on a bench typically, you take either a dumbbell or even an easy bar. And with almost or completely straight arms, you go all the way back and then come all the way up.
The really, really awesome thing about pullovers is that they accomplish something similar to lap prayers as far as length and tension relationships. When you're at the bottom of a pullover and the upper arm and lower arm are almost parallel to the ground or very close, that's where you're putting in the most tension into your back muscles, but are also at the most length and position. Amazing. And then when you come up and then you bring the bar or the dumbbell completely overhead and now your arms are perpendicular to the ground, the vector of gravity no longer is putting tension through your lats or muscles of the back.
It's neutral. It's at zero. Your lats don't have to try. It's actually just your triceps still keeping the arm extended is the only thing active.
That's an awesome thing as the weight and as the exercise approaches. less and less stretch of the lats, the amount of force in position through gravity also declines, which is great. That's another way of saying that this exercise is almost ideally stretch biased. Not only does it put the lats and the back muscles into a really hyper stretch position, it also imposes the highest forces there. And not only that, but it imposes very low forces in the contracted position.
So that contracted position doesn't have to sap a ton of energy away from you like it would in pull downs and... a couple of other exercises. So pullovers are amazing. They're a little wacky on your joints sometimes if you're not super flexible on the shoulder, so ease into it. You can use easy bars.
You can use dumbbells. You can use a straight bar if you're a real baller. Either way you slice it, it's a very, very good exercise. Make sure to go slow on the way down, pause at the bottom for a second or two, and then don't rocket back up. Slowly control the ascent back up.
It's a little bit of an interesting position for your joints. Nothing unsafe. You just have to be a little bit. wise about it.
So that's an excellent exercise to try to replace lat pulldowns with. Another exercise that for me personally, I found does a really, really good job of being an exercise that steps in when lat pulldowns come kind of stale and does a better job for a while is the pull-up, just the regular body weight pull-up or with weight added to it. To me, the pull-down suffers from another problem I actually haven't mentioned yet.
but it's a general problem suffered by, I think, pretty much all machines or most of them. It's the fact that probably the eccentric phase of contraction, that is when your muscles are lengthening under tension, is a little bit more growth promoting than the concentric when they're shortening. But almost all machines are designed in such a way that when you're doing a concentric phase, the weight of the implement and the frictional coefficient add up together or not the coefficient, the frictional forces. The friction and the weight add up together.
However, or friction and weight, big weight, little friction, but still meaningful. That means the concentric is tougher. However, on the way down, the friction actually helps you and it subtracts away from the eccentric forces, which end up being substantially smaller.
That's actually flipping the mechanism on its head. We would want a situation in which the eccentric is really hard, but the concentric is easier. On almost every machine, we get the opposite. However, in a free motion bodyweight movement like the pull-up, your eccentric is not facing any kind of frictional forces that oppose it, and your concentric doesn't get any frictional forces to help it out. So all of a sudden, you get a lot of eccentric force demand, and that typically causes a lot of delayed onset soreness.
probably a lot of muscle growth. So for me, pull-ups are awesome. I like to pull out to the face or chin level, not all the way to the clavicles.
It's a baller for street physique type of folks and parkour, et cetera. But aside from skill development for sport, maximum muscle growth is probably going to be achieved if you stop sort of around the head, eye, chin, forehead, wherever you like kind of level, not all the way to the chest. And as soon as I get there, I'm going to engage my lats and everything else. and really control that eccentric, especially on the halfway down mark. So as soon as I'm halfway down, I'm really controlling that eccentric.
Everything's getting super, super pulled apart. And that I can tell. If you let me do three sets of lat pull-downs versus three sets of pull-ups, and I'm unaccustomed to both, three sets of pull-ups typically mess me up substantially more. And if you've been doing pull-downs for a while, but they're now getting stale, switching to pull-ups, guys, I promise you, feels different, and it's going to give you more growth, at least in the short run.
term. Lastly, assisted pull-ups. Here's the real trippy thing about assisted pull-ups.
On a basic analysis on paper, Assisted pull-ups seem to be the literal same thing as pull-downs, but for some damn reason they're not. Especially a well-made assisted pull-up machine can make it so you're very aware of that mind-muscle connection and you're able to really control the eccentric in a way that seems even a little strange to do with pull-downs and definitely almost impossible to do with pull-ups because they're just so damn hard. So assisted pull-ups, I would recommend doing in a similar way technique-wise that you would do your pull-downs, but I would say accelerate and rock it up. And then once you get up to the very top, slowly open up and let that eccentric sink in. That mind-muscle connection to your lats as the eccentric pulls them apart under tension is a really good thing.
For more advanced folks, this is a great exercise in which to really work on that mind-muscle connection with your back. And just... because you can really get a gnarly eccentric going and you can really feel out your back. So you can basically get a gnarly eccentric going in a way that is tough to do with pull-downs.
You can feel out your back in a way that's very possible to do with pull-downs, but very difficult to do with pull-ups. So kind of assisted pull-ups combine a little bit of the best of both worlds from both pull-ups and pull-downs, and at the very least, an awesome variation to try. If you haven't done them before, do careful.
They catch up to you quick. Say, ah, I do four sets of pull-downs. You do four sets of assisted pull-ups on a decent machine and really control that eccentric, you're going to be like, holy crap, this is way bigger stimulus.
Some of that's just because of variation. You haven't done it in a while. Some of that is, I think, because of the unique factors of that exercise. So definitely a great variation to try as far as exercise in addition to lat prayers, in addition to pull-overs, in addition to pull-ups.
And now we have one more, assisted pull-ups. So pull-downs with this, not problem, but little... situation where maybe they're not ideal all the time, but now we have multiple classes and types of exercises with which to delete the pull-downs out of our program, replace with some of these other exercises, go for a few months on these exercises until they start getting stale.
And then when you reintroduce pull-downs, maybe with different grips than you're used to, the novelty is going to give you some awesome growth right there and then right from the start. Just taking a break from pull-downs that's a few months in length can really refresh that movement. Some people... have movements that are so core to their programs, like lat pulldowns, they just never delete and replace them.
That means after a while, those movements are not hyper-efficient anymore. You can avoid this by using other exercises, some of which are suggested here. So just consider some of these options in the mix, see which ones you like best, try them for a while, and if you use the RPI Pertrophy app, it's got all of these replacement exercises right in there.
You can click on them and see video demonstrations to see if you even have the equipment or if it looks like something you want to be doing. You can find all the great exercises. You can even make up your own if you want.
And then that app will program them in for you and treat them like every other exercise. It's going to challenge you a little bit. It's going to auto-regulate for you to make sure you're getting enough of a challenge but not too much.
It's going to progress you on sets. All that good stuff. So give the RP hypertrophy app a try. But even if you're not using it, give some of these other exercises a try.
And again, what do we tell in pull-downs? We're saying, look, you're awesome. But I'm going to date other people too. And by date, I mean train. And by other people, I mean with different exercises.
And look, if you have a problem with that, I mean, doors right there, pull downs. And yeah, no, I mean, I don't love you. I like you a lot. Oh, sorry, sorry.
Here, I got an even nastier one. I love you, but I'm not like in love with you. Do you know what I mean?
Boy, have I heard that one a lot.